"But I'll make you this offer, out of consideration of my friendship for Peter, and your attachment for the old place, and all of that stuff: I'll take Joe over, under writing, till he's twenty-one, at ten dollars a month and all found, winter and summer through, and allow you to stay right on here in the house, with a couple of acres for your chickens and garden patch and your posies and all the things you set store on and prize. I'll do this for you, Missis Newbolt, but I wouldn't do it for any other human being alive." She turned slowly to him, an expression of mingled amazement and fear on her face. "You mean that you want me to bind Joe out to you till he's his own man?" said she. "Well, some call it by that name," nodded Chase, "but it's nothing more than any apprenticeship to any trade, except--oh, well, there ain't no difference, except that there's few trades that equal the one the boy'll learn under me, ma'am." "You're askin' me to bind my little son--my only child left to me of all that I bore--you want me to bind him out to you like a nigger slave!" Her voice fell away to a whisper, unable to bear the horror that grew into her words. "Better boys than him have been bound out in this neighborhood!" said Chase sharply. "If you don't want to do it, _don't_ do it. That's all I've got to say. If you'd rather go to the poorhouse than see your son in steady and honorable employment, in a good home, and learning a business under a man that's made some success of it, that's your lookout, not mine. But that's where you'll land the minute you set your foot out in that road. Then the county court'll take your boy and bind him out to somebody, and you'll have no word to say in the matter, at all. But you can suit yourself." "It--kind of--shook me," she muttered, the mother-love, the honor and justice in her quailing heart shrinking back before the threat of that terrible disgrace--the poorhouse. The shadow of the poorhouse had stood in her way for years. It had been the fear of Peter when he was there, and his last word was one of thankfulness to the Almighty that he had been permitted to die in a freeman's bed, under his own humble roof. That consolation was to be denied her; the shadow of the poorhouse had advanced until it stood now at her door. One step and it would envelop her; the taint of its blight would wither her heart. Sarah Newbolt had inherited that dread of publicly confessed poverty and dependence. It had come down to her through a long line of pioneer forebears who feared neither hardship, strife nor death, so that it might come to them without a master and under the free sky. Only the disgraced, the disowned, the failures, and the broken-minded made an end in the poorhouse in those vigorous days. It was a disgrace from which a family never could hope to rise again. There, on the old farm with Peter she had been poor, as poor as the poorest, but they had been free to come and go.